Word: merman
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...tuna-melt sandwiches and hot-fudge sundaes. Maybe part of the extra attention was also due to some special parental intuition that their youngest was the most gifted of the brood. At six, Johnny was off visiting Sister Ellen in a road company of Gypsy. "He'd mouth all Merman's songs from the records," she remembers, "and he could dance every part." When he was nine, he got his first part in a local workshop production of Who'll Save the Plowboy? A retrospective appreciation from Mom: "He had only two or three lines, but he said them...
Some enchanted evening, they always said, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman would appear together in a two-woman show on Broadway. And so it finally happened in a one-night benefit replete with hoops and hoopla and costumes from South Pacific, Gypsy and, of course, Hello, Dolly! Briefly joining the high jinks onstage were the likes of Yul Brynner, Burgess Meredith, Joel Grey and Geoffrey Holder-who kicked up their heels in an all-male chorus line. When it was over, Ethel, 68, sighed, "Fm on Cloud Nine," and Mary. 63, was still savoring the roars of the audience...
Died. Michael Greer, 60, fashionable interior decorator (for Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper); of strangulation; in Manhattan. At week's end police were searching Manhattan's gay community for clues to his murderer. Greer, an admitted homosexual, was reportedly seen at a gay leather bar hours before his death...
...just wanted them all to be themselves, talking. I didn't want recording-studio sound, which is like watching a giant TV set up onstage. I worked hard to keep the sound of the kids' voices real. I didn't want them to sound like Ethel Merman by merely whispering into a mike. Neither did I want their faces to look plastic. The boys wear no makeup, and the girls are in street makeup. There are no baby-pink gels to make them look theatrical. They are under hot white lights, which are hard on a face...
...only be that Streisand has worn us down out of sheer volume and stubbornness, but she seems to have mellowed. She does not act quite so much like the stepchild of Ethel Merman who spent summers with Mae West. When she does come on, James Caan is available to perform whatever deflation is necessary. Caan, who plays the flashy Broadway impresario Billy Rose to Streisand's Brice, stands up well under the painful effulgence of her superstardom. He is a scrappy actor, always looking for an opening, and he finds his full share of them-or makes them. Only...